Jared Soares has traveled to Bolivia and Paris to find compelling photo projects, but for his latest he only needed to walk out his front door in Virginia.
Soares' new documentary photos focus on the small town of Martinsville – near Roanoke, where he lives. The factory city has a population of approximately 14,000 people, and in recent years it has suffered from outsourcing and the economic downturn.
“For 75 years the textile and furniture industries in Martinsville employed thousands of people who produced American-made clothes, linens and furniture with familiar names like Bassett, Stanley and Fieldcrest,” says Soares.
Now many of those jobs have been shipped overseas and the town is plagued with unemployment. A quarter of the population lives below the poverty line and the children growing up there have no concept of the town's previous prosperity. "Martinsville is a shell of what it used to be,” says Soares.
Soares, a seasoned documentary photographer who has worked with big news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, has been documenting the plight of Martinsville since October 2010. The year before that he had traveled to Bolivia to cover the re-election of Evo Morales, then spent time documenting a Roma community outside of Paris. His storytelling style involves developing a rapport with the people he photographs through shared common interests and listening. So when he started learning more about the dire straits of Martinsville, he hit the streets to meet the people in his community.
“I went skateboarding at the park, drank coffee in Uptown and attended a few community meetings,” says Soares. “I wasn’t aware of it at first but I was connecting with people who were like me ... I would just spend time hanging out – a lot of time hanging out.”
Through the connections he made with people within the community, he was able to make images that captured an intimate portrait of this small town.
Soares hopes his on-going project will raise awareness for the economic issues that face the region, and is striving to get the work in front of policy makers both locally and nationally.
“If Martinsville’s economic condition is an indicator of what America will look like in the near future, then it must be documented and it must be seen.”
To see more of Soares' work, visit jaredsoares.com.
